Databases

The ESPaCE Consortium has worked on the elaboration of several data bases.

• Astrometric photographic plates database

  This data basis provides the digital copies of the astrometric plates taken in the past and digitized at the Royal observatory of Belgium. The mosaics are composed of Singles of the level of 2.5MB (footprints 1280 x 1024 pixels, of 7 μm x 7 μm) and combined using step and stare digitisation with overlapping. The number of singles that are necessary for one plate depends on the plate size. For a plate size of 16 cm x 16 cm for instance, the total amount of file size is 2.35GB and the non-covered mosaics are at the level of 930MB (for a 13 cm x 18 cm plate, it is 1.85GB; for a 13 cm x 16 cm plate, it is 1.82GB)

  2364 old photographic plates of the natural satellites are available: 483 plates for Mars; 732 plates for Jupiter; 1106 plates for Saturn; 24 plates for Uranus; 12 plates for Neptune; 4 for Pluto.

  Pre-scans of the plates before cleaning were performed for all plates digitized by ROB in the ESPaCE project in TIFF format.

  The envelopes of all plates digitized by ROB in the ESPaCE project were scanned and are available in PDF format.
  The meta-data has been encoded in Excel files.

  This material is available on the website so that the user can see what is on the plate, and the large complete files are available on demand.

• SPICE kernels for Mars Express

  These kernels are for Mars Express spacecraft, "Spacecraft ephemeris, Planet, satellite, comet, or asteroid ephemerides, Instrument description kernel, Pointing kernel, Events kernel" (SPICE) kernels and are provided on the NASA Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) website, with the denomination MEX_ROB_yy0101_yy1231_003.bsp where yy stands for the years.

  We provide the files here below for

  • 2004
  • 2005
  • 2006
  • 2007
  • 2008
  • 2009
  • 2010
  • 2011
  • 2012
  • 2013

• Selected image map and topographic data products

  The ESPaCE TU Berlin team has obtained new shape models for the Martian moon Phobos, based on new image data of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) of Mars Express. A new digital terrain model (DTM) was computed. This DTM has benefit from Mars Express spacecraft close Phobos encounters, which provided the opportunity to observe regions in high resolution with the HRSC. The data can be found on the TU Berlin website.

  A spherical harmonic function model of which the coefficients were improved up to degree and order 45 was provided by Willner et al. (2014) together with control point network (Oberst et al., 2014), rotation, and shape of Phobos.

  Earlier the shape model and control point network had been derived based on a smaller data set (Willner et al., 2010). Since 2010, the Mars Express spacecraft had more close Phobos encounters providing the opportunity to observe regions in high resolution with the HRSC that had not been observed in such detail and thus to improve e.g. the shape model. Results of this work are described by Willner et al. (2014).

  Further activities include the derivation of surface models and referenced maps for the Apollo Lunar Landing sites. First maps and digital elevation models have been provided here others are in preparation. Maps have been derived from LROC NAC images using a self-developed ISIS compatible software (Tasdelen et al., 2012). Further, a co-registration to the LOLA reference was performed to assure a correct global reference.

• Interface with Europlanet SA-IDIS

  There are some of our products that are incorporated or are using data from the EuroPlaNet SA-IDIS at DLR website and at OBSPAR website.

• NSDB Natural satellites data base

  All data reduced through the Work Package 6 have been added to the NSDB data base. NSDB1 is dedicated to raw data and NSDB2 to standard data ready-to-use for ephemerides making.

• Ephemerides of natural satellites

  Website where the ephemerides of natural satellites are provided, by means of an interactive page for computing moons ephemerides.
  The ephemerides are also provided in the from of SPICE kernels. They are provided for Mars' moons, Phobos and Deimos, for Saturnian moons as well as for Uranus' moons.

• Rotation of natural satellites

  Rotation models for natural satellites are also provided in the from of SPICE kernels.

• Physical parameters and characteristics of satellite systems

  Website providing tables of orbital and physical parameters and characteristics of satellite systems.